$5 Supplements—Yours For $39: Watch THIS Before You Buy Another Supplement by @jeroseland on 3Speak
The supplement industry is a capitalist wild wild west, a profiteers' paradise, a mostly unregulated free market, and smart consumers should beware. When you realize that no one verifies that the a...
Tags: #health #supplements #biohacking
Let me confirm something you already know on a gut level. The supplement industry is a capitalist wild, wild west, a profiteers paradise, a mostly unregulated free market, and smart consumers should beware. While the ubiquitous white... Nutrition Fax box you see on the labeling of packaging looks official. Anyone with basic word processing software or AI can create such a representation of the ingredients ostensibly in a product. When you realize that No one verifies the actual ingredients in a given product. You realize how much of a decision to buy and take a supplement is based upon trust. I'm Jonathan Roseland with Limitless, and this is a update. republishing revamp of a really important piece of biohacking 101 content. And the supplement health industry has moved, some changed, some, for the better in a lot of ways, in the 15 years that I've been in the space. So I thought I would reproduce this podcast because the discriminatory nature of the sophisticated biohacker, that's what actually makes biohacking effective. And I'm going to break down some things here that they might be a little bit shocking to you. They'll make you a smarter buyer. because you have limited time, limited money to invest in the things that are actually going to make a difference in your health. Something that you might notice about this podcast is that I have no DOM ads for random things that interrupt it. Yeah, VPNs, mattresses, mobile games, I'm not trying to sell you any of those kinds of things, because I value your time and attention, and I'd be wasting it if I was trying to pitch something totally unrelated to the topic of the episode that you've chosen to listen to. If you appreciate that... Please leave me one of those algorithmic signals that just shows that you're finding this helpful, subscribe, like, upvote, comment. Yeah, those things. They actually do make a big difference. If you're on one of those podcast platforms, Spotify, or Apple, get me like a five -star review. If you get to the end of this and you learn something and it makes you just a little bit wiser in the supplement choosing department, yeah, I think maybe I deserve a five-star review as a result of that. When I get those reviews, especially the five -star rating plus the little review, whenever I get those, that really does make my day. So I appreciate that. Let's dive back into the article by talking about the nutrition facts. And the nutrition facts, in that white label in the back, they are often nutrition fiction. When supplement companies sell products to consumers, they can count on most consumers, not verifying what they are consuming. Sure, the consumers could send products off for testing at a third-party lab, but that costs hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars. And while there are some consumer spectroscopy devices coming to market, and those promise to disrupt multiple industries that prey on the voracious and naive consumer. I'm hoping those kind of devices come to the markets sooner rather than later. At the current time, consumers have virtually no way of determining what they're actually putting in their bodies most of the time. But there's some good news. To make almost certain... that you're getting the real stuff, insist on always buying and taking pharmaceutical grade supplements. Here's what that is. When a university spends six figures or more to conduct a major double-blind, placebo-controlled study with dozens of human participants, they verify that the compounds, ingredients, or supplements they are using are real. The potential negative repercussions of not doing so are huge. First, a study conducted with illegitimate ingredients would produce inaccurate results. Scientists know that once their study is published in a journal, their colleagues at other universities may recreate their experiment to verify their findings. Not to mention, these scientists have to spend as much as $20,000 to $40,000 just on the publishing of those studies. Yeah, 30 to 40K, just to get your study into a major journal. Second, many if viewed between scientists and universities. has its origin in one researcher challenging the conclusions, another reached after a study. Third, a mistake in process or methodology during a study, referred to as having dirty test tubes, can result in a researcher being fired, a university's reputation. being damaged, or an organization losing its funding from the government. So these guys are seriously motivated to make certain they are using the real stuff. And in their labs, they have the means to do SPO. They spend extra to get pharmaceutical grade, and so should you. Pharmaceutical-grade manufacturers and distributors aren't intrinsically more ethical. It's just that they know their products are going to be tested for legitimacy and purity by their most important customers. And that's business that they stand to lose if they put out anything less than the real thing. Now, let's talk about the grades of ingredients, and we'll return first to pharmaceutical grade. The purity, dissolution, and absorption of a given vitamin or compound are third-party tested and verified to meet regulatory standards that come from the National Pharmacopoeia. Pharmaceutical grade can be obtained without a prescription, but typically they are sold by licensed healthcare practitioners. Companies that distribute this grade will typically be good manufacturing practice that's a GMP certified. So look for GMP certified on the labeling and websites that you're going to be ordering from. Pharmaceutical grade means that it's required to be between 97, 98, 99% pure. You're actually never going to get 100% pure. Yes, sorry to disappoint you, 100% purity doesn't exist. But... This grade is required to be within a couple of percentage points of it. And I do link to an article that I did one time on GMP, and this is perhaps my most boring article. GMP requirements are incredibly stringent and incredibly dry reading. So, and I explored them, and, yes, probably my most boring article. And I've got that linked in the article version of this whole presentation about choosing... pharmaceutical grade, that's going to be through the link that appears below wherever you are watching or listening to me here. Next grade that is probably worth your money is medical grade. And so these are high-grade, high-purity vitamins, although they might not undergo the stringent third-party verification that pharmaceutical-grade vitamins have to. If you can't find pharmaceutical grade, you'll usually be fine taking medical grade supplements, and the benefits that you'll experience, probably going to be the same. Thirdly, cosmetic or nutritional grade. And these are what you will typically find on the shelves of the health food stores, there in those white plastic bottles. and nutritional grade is not tested for absorption or purity. No one actually tests the products, the contents of these products. In this age of convenient e-commerce, you're better off just avoiding this grade altogether and ordering pharmaceutical grade or medical grade online. Supplements of this grade will contain some very dubious extra ingredients, like cornstarch, folic acid, those occipient ingredients, and chemical preservatives, some that the FDA does not even require the manufacturer to list on the label. Next. food grade. This is for additions to food product. So think about the healthy breakfast cereals that boast about being fortified with vitamins and nutrients, and then the people who you know that have those cereals for breakfast are never very healthy people at all, are they. Typically... Food grade is very low quality. The food business is a doggedly competitive arena, where most consumers make decisions almost completely on price. So food manufacturers are almost always looking for the lowest cost individual ingredients. And finally, we have feed or veterinarian grade. And this is compounds for consumption by our furry friends and industrial animals. And I gotta say, if you're the kind of pet owner that's going to give your furry friends... feed grade vitamins, you're not that great of a friend to the furry ones. That's my contention. Next, let's take a further look at the eight most popular types of neutropics. The human brain is an incredibly complex system, with thousands of different processes occurring at any given moment. For biohackers, this gives us a lot of different angles to take on cognitive enhancement. These eight categories represent hundreds of different mechanisms of action that enhance cognition, improved memory, treat depression, empowered neuroplasticity, speed up skill set acquisition, help with focus and minimize stress, along with preventing and even reversing cognitive decline. So we've got amino acids, acetylacholine, precursors, adaptogens, antioxidants, B vitamins, herbs, mitochondrial support. I mentioned modafinil in there because it is so popular, despite, in my opinion, being kind of a crappy smart drug, NED boosters, nutraceuticals, nutrients, and the rassetams. And... What I'm going to do here is I'm not actually going to make any recommendations of vendors for these things. And here's why. In my experience, about 15 years in the biohacking biz, I found that... Sadly, a lot of times the companies that have really high quality products, the really mission -driven companies out there that really give a damn about the health of their consumers and sell those products at a reasonable competitive prices, a lot of times those guys get... out-competed by the companies that are just trying to make a buck, by the shammy, scammy kind of companies. And I've also seen a couple times when there was a really high-quality vendor that offered really good products, but then they were acquired, or they came under new management, and the product quality dropped. And then I had biohackers in my audience sending me tips about this sort of thing. So in this article, which has been recently updated, As is the same in my meta-analysis articles on limitlessmindset.com, what I do is I update these articles about once a year with my current... vetted recommendation of vendors for these things. And yeah, so I'm going to ask you to get outside of your digital comfort zone, just a little bit. I know that you're right now watching or listening to me on one of these platforms that capture our attention so well. But I'm going to ask you to go over to my website, link below, and that's where I'm going to have the recommendations that... I stand behind that I think are really going to serve your health. Moving forward, let's talk about pharmaceutical-grade neutropic stacks. I've been a hardcore consumer of neutropics for over a decade now, and I'm increasingly less and less of a believer in most of those neutropic stack products. You can't fit grams and grams of paracetam and a substantive dosage of coline in a single pill. So manufacturers trying to add 5 to 10, and sometimes a lot more than 10, different ingredients to a single pill, will decrease the quantities needed to truly insignificant amounts. and I believe in taking neutropics and health supplements in the dosages that are recommended in the clinical studies to have cognition enhancing effects. I don't want to take, there's an argument for microdosing, but I'm not completely convinced up at this point. and the majority of neutropic stacks that are putting a bunch of different ingredients into a single product, well, they don't offer clinically efficacious dosages. Also, here's something to think about. Supplement stack distributors are less likely to have stringent quality standards for individual ingredients. Most... stack distributors are just white labeling ingredients. This is a business model prone to low quality. Here's why. Let's say that their source of pharmaceutical grade B vitamins, which might comprise 40% of the ingredients in their stack runs out. Are they going to stop selling? that product until they find another downstream source of equal quality? Not likely. What they will do is switch to another vendor who can get the raw materials to them as soon as possible, regardless of quality. In contrast, a company that sells a single ingredient product is more liable for the quality of that ingredient. By the way, in this article, I include a screenshot of an email that I got from a company that does white... labeling of a brain formula, neutropic stack. And get this, the cost on the brain formula, neutropic stack, is $4.69. Yeah, so they were offering that to me so that I could slap some fancy label on it, and then sell it myself. And so that just makes you think about all the neutropic stacks that you see out there that are marketed for $29, $39, and even more, that are probably just a white -labeled crap product that actually only costs about five bucks. With my reservations made on Nutropic Stacks, there are several that I've been impressed with, personally, that I do recommend enthusiastically, and I have confirmed the use of pharmaceutical-grade ingredients in them, but again, I'm not going to mention them. Here, you're going to have to go over to my website where I have an up -to-date list of that, along with the COAs. Moving forward, let's talk about the worst case scenario. In the past decade, there have been a couple of highly publicized... instances of supplement manufacturers putting out products that actively harmed the health of their customers. Like Feng Fenn, I bet you've heard of that one, and C-R-A-Z-E, that was the popular pre-workout powder that turned out to just be meth. Yeah, it was this pre-workout that dropped on the... market and people were like really blown away by the performance enhancing effects of it and that's because all of these health conscious people going to the gym, well, they were just unwittingly on meth. The jail sentences and lawsuits resulting from these sorts of instances will hopefully motivate even the most opportunistic and unethical supplement distributors to make sure they aren't selling poison to their customers. So the odds of a non-pharmacological-grade product poisoning you or making you sick, well, probably low, but do you want to take the chance? As some biohacking experts have said, the biggest risk of being a supplement junkie is having expensive P. Your liver will automatically filter out superfluous vitamins, nutrients, or supplement filler that your system doesn't need or can't absorb. And I would say that my 15 year experience as a professional Biohacker is largely confirmatory. Of that, I have tried just unending amounts of supplements at this point, and most of them, pharmaceutical grade, but I'm sure there's a few in there that were not, and are there instances of times when I got really sick or where I feel like there was a supplement that harmed me out of the... Hundreds I've tried at this point. I can't really think of anything, so I guess that's kind of a good sign. Let's talk about certificates of analysis, several leading neutropics distributors. And I list a couple that I think are smart choices provide certificates of analysis by... third-party labs, usually in the form of PDF documents. And you can find these on their websites or by request. These certificates will show the percentage of the advertised ingredients the product actually contains any microbial presence, this like yeast or mold, along with any trace amounts of compounds, like lead or arsenic found. The COAs provide the name and contact information of the lab that did the testing. So you could call them up and confirm the results if you wanted. And this is actually an area of optimism, of the, I think, the supplement industry getting more ethical. Yeah. Actually, because years and years and years ago, when I first started Limitless, I would send unending emails. I sent so many of these emails to different neutropics companies and supplement companies saying, hey, can you please show me your COAs for your product so I can make sure that they're pure and the real thing. And they would give me a bunch of silly excuses, why they couldn't. But I kept putting pressure on different vendors and I tried to promote the vendors that did provide that proof. And these days, I'm encouraged by the number of supplement companies that have their COAs right there on their product pages. You go to the product page and you hit Control F. COA or Control F certificate, and a lot of times I see those, and then you click on the certificate, and what you look for is a third-party accredited lab that has done that analysis and found that the assay conforms. And you want labs that are typically based in... North America, maybe Australia, New Zealand, or in Europe. That's what I usually look for. A red flag is if the lab is in China, and it's usually pretty obvious because of the language on the certificate, and the name of the scientist at the lab that did that... confirmation report. But yeah, if you see a COA with an accredited lab with an American address and a American and a phone number on it, that's a pretty good sign. That's about the best piece of evidence that we can hope for that we are getting the real thing. Next, COAs. aren't actually something, the certificates of analysis that are so important, they're actually something that have been featured in fiction. Well, they've been featured in the novel I wrote. It's called Hourglass. and I said, you know what, there's already a million nonfiction books about biohacking and health, and a lot of them are kind of boring, so instead, I took my 15 years of obsession with this topic and layered it into a thriller about a biohacking cybercriminal that has to save civilization from the same end. comet that destroyed Atlantis 12,800 years ago. And it's kind of a funny novel because it has a bunch of footnotes in it. For whenever there's a biohacking thing or a science thing in the driving the thrilling plot forward, I have a footnotes so that people can learn more about that if they want. Yeah, it's like a novel that you're actually going to learn a lot of things from. And I will... include just a short excerpt from the audiobook. This was going to take the best smart drug stack he'd ever encountered. Cab Eisho, as its idiosyncratic inventor called it, was a combination of pharmaceutical grade ingredients. Cab Eisho was something he'd used before, and he had a small stash of the black and red capsules it came in remaining. He checked certificates of analysis from a time -of-flight laboratory of the ingredients, and ordered a larger supply rushed from a source that only accepted payment and privacy altcoins. But it was such a potent cognitive enhancer that he didn't want to run into its tolerance curve. He'd use it on alternating days with another smart drug stack. Next, important... prosumer tip that I've got for you is to avoid cheap supplements. Finding the best deal on any given commodity is highly encouraged. That's what smart consumers do, usually, right? Indeed, we're kind of regarded as foolish if we don't shop around just a little bit. If you're going to buy a house, a car, or a pair of shoes, you want the best deal, assuming that you are getting like the same make and model, right? You shop around to get the best deal. That's what we do in our household. Common sense, though, would dictate that applying that same thinking to buying supplements would be disastrous, and yes, it is. Yet, cheap wins out consistently online over quality and credibility and they're two big problems with buying cheap or on sale supplements that you should be aware of. First of all, counterfeiting. Yeah, any drug or supplement that commercially does well is assured to be ripped off by counterfeiters in China. to quote FDA agent and forensic investigator Gary Collins on counterfeit supplements. During my FDA tenure, we ran lab tests on all kinds of lookalike pills and capsules.…